Burda Style 02/2013 - 115 Maxi dress

I'm thrilled to hear lots of you are planning to visit Hong Kong, I think I have contacted you all already, but just to extend the offer if anyone is ever here and fancies a meet up or fabric shopping tour please do drop me a note.

Not only have I been sewing a lot recently, I've also just got around to photos so lets catch up on some projects that are in the blog queue.

Back in September last year I first made this maxi dress from the 02/2013 issue of BurdaStyle.

Here's the original Burda pattern :

On my original post I mentioned that I might make it again as a shorter dress.  Usually stating stuff like that on my blog means it will never happen, but this time it did.

Sort of.

I tried this as a shorter dress using some blue snakeprint jersey, it was around knee length before I pinned the hem and looked great  until I tried it on!  It just looked awful, very frumpy and unflattering.  I can't claim to really understand why, but the proportions just did not work - on me at least, I expect if you have amazing legs and washboard abs it would look good, but let's face it anything would!

I still really like the top of the dress and didn't want to waste it so using the leftover strips of fabric I turned it back into a maxi by adding a ruffle cut on the cross grain so that the pattern mismatch didn't look too odd.





There are a couple of other small changes I made - I left off the shoulder gathering to get a bit of shoulder coverage and also left off the waist ties which I thought would not work on a shorter dress.  I would quite like to have them on this longer version, but no fabric so it will stay as it is.

Despite some disappointment along the way I like how this turned out and while I don't need a ton of maxi dresses in my life at least now this one looks a bit different to it's predecessor.

Shopping Splurge

I went to the Hong Kong garment district of Sham Shui Po for a few supplies and inevitably came back with a bunch of fabrics too.  I went a bit crazy with the prints, I just can't help it, so I will need to go back and really try to just buy some solid coloured pieces.

Every time I go I find a new store so I'm going to add a few details for future reference.  This was an unusually efficient trip largely because it was incredibly hot!

First up the fabrics, all of the ones immediately below came from the fabric stalls set up along Ki Lung Street.  Predominantly cottons and a stall that sells interfacing and another that is good for serger threads and other bits and bobs.

Striped navy and turquoise cotton pique and an oversized ikat print cotton blend, I think navy dress and an ikat pencil skirt for these pieces.

Two lovely pieces of cotton sateen, definitely a floral pencil skirt and possibly a black & white dress

Black and beige printed cotton, not sure what this is going to be yet....

Large panel print purple chiffon, absolutely no idea what I will do with it, but I had to bring it home with me

I wanted to get some piping cord, a detail that Carolyn uses often and which I always admire.  I found some at the supplies stall on the same street and asked for 20 yards.  The stallholder could not find the end and could not be bothered to measure off 20 yards so we did a deal for the whole bundle.  I have no idea if it was a good deal for me or not because I am kind of with the stall holder here and can't be bothered to measure it myself, but I can probably pipe everything I make for the rest of my life and still have some left over!

Ball of spaghetti!

These next pieces came from Moon Yue Fabrics, a gem of a store which has higher end fabrics, although the jerseys and silk linings are very reasonably priced here.
Moon Yue Piece Goods, 1/F, 125-127 Yu Chau St, Sham Shui Po

Digital print jewel silk crepe.  This is a contender for the wedding outfit next Friday if I can get my act together.  My back up plan is this Donna Karan number.

Border print jersey, some kind of dress I'm sure

Geometric print silk blend, love the colours in this, planning a simple but versatile skirt

 Finally for the supplies I actually went for in the first place - elastic and bar hooks - I managed to get in one store plus a couple of interesting beaded necklines to sew onto something.  This place also has lots of lace trims and I noticed bra fixings like rings and sliders if I ever go down that road.
Po Fai Ho Garment Accessories, 158 Yu Chau St, Sham Shui Po.  They even have a website 

I've got a few finished things lined up to post, just need to get onto the photography!

Burda Style 07/2011 - 110 Dress

Yikes I didn't realise it had been so long since my last post : I've had a succession of visitors hogging my sewing room, flu, 2 overseas trips and I guess my usual loss of sewing mojo that always seems to happen as the seasons are changing.

One of my trips was to Devon in the UK for a family wedding and I really wanted to make something new to wear.  I found some gorgeous silk crepe and planned to make the Matthew Williamson designer dress from Burda Style 09/2012 - 134 that has been on my list for ages and even (gasp!) made a muslin which turned out to be a good move as I realised I would prefer it with a lower v neckline.  I started to look at other patterns to modify it and realised I had already made a very similar dress - Burda Style 07/2011 - 110 so I dug that out instead.

Plan A and Plan B respectively

You can see the previous version here, this time around I left off the pockets and tried to give the fabric the treatment it deserved by underlining it with silk organza and lining in silk.  The end result feels incredibly luxurious to wear, but I won't lie it took an age to do - and the dress still wrinkled after sitting  although it fared pretty well being pulled straight out of a suitcase the night before.  I also switched the zip to the centre back to make it easier to fine tune the fit not to mention getting the dress on and off without messing up hair and makeup!

I wore it at the wedding with nude suede shoes and some gold jewellery.  The wedding was on Easter Saturday and luckily it was sunny, I did have to borrow my husbands jacket for champagne and canapés which were served outside while millions of official photographs were taken, but otherwise the dress did its job well.

Not that I had options where I bought the fabric, but my colour choice wasn't the smartest.  I have another wedding to attend here in Hong Kong this month and while I don't think it will be a traditional chinese wedding, I still feel it's a bit of a no no to wear red - rather like a guest wearing white to a western wedding.  So I will have a rummage through my wardrobe and decide if I want to make something new or not.  This may mean I have to go fabric shopping again, how terrible!!!

Burda Style Magazine 11/2012 - 138 Vintage Reproduction Dress

This was the popular vintage reproduction dress from the November 2012 issue of Burda magazine.

I don't usually read the instructions before delving into a project so it was good to read Melissa's review of this pattern which highlighted this little gem that Burda put right at the end.

"Burda’s instructions have you stitch these darts closed for the first 2cm, then baste closed for the rest of the length, then press. Then if you skip to the very last step in the instructions, they say to unpick all the basting stitches, but warn that if you ever want to launder it, you need to baste them all closed again (this time without any of the thread-traced guidelines!). W-t-f? Who in the history of NEVER would ever do that?"

Well quite!  Maybe when this pattern was originally produced people still did things like that.  Melissa handled this by carefully marking all the curved darts and leaving them sewn closed, you can read all about her fabulous dress here - Fehr Trade.  I have gone for the completely opposite and far lazier approach to not even sew them up in the first place - I just marked the ends with snips and folded the pleats in the fabric.



Once you've dispensed with that step this is a fairly quick and easy dress to sew up.  You can't really see in these photos but where the centre front bodice meets the skirt is more of a curve on my version rather than a point like the line drawing.  This was not planned I just merrily stitched it all together before realising it looked different!  My collar also flips out a bit, but at least it is doing it symmetrically, I should have used a stiffer interfacing.

Honestly I think this dress would be more successful on someone with a smaller bust than me as the pleats don't really stay where they are meant to (serves me right for not going with Melissa's stitched up approach!), but I am pretty happy with it and enjoying wearing this midi length.

I've used an aubergine (if I'm honest it's just purple by another name!) coloured doubleknit which has enough stretch to eliminate the zip although the recommended fabric for this pattern is jersey, I guess test trying it on and decide if you need a zip.  I also eliminated the back split, which I usually do if I can walk in it OK.

Savvysista commented recently whether my lack of lining in all these doubleknit dresses meant that they rode up and I really had to think about it because it's not something I had ever thought about or noticed.  Then I realised that I usually wear a half slip under knit dresses whatever the weather just to help smooth out lumps and bumps.

So much for my hopes of doing more interesting photoshoots!  I realise I must talk about the weather a lot (I'm English, it's in my genes) as Haramiya asked how I could stand the weather in the summer here.  Well I've lived here almost 13 years now with no plans to leave.  It's true that the summers can be pretty oppressive with high temperatures, humidity, monsoon rains and the odd typhoon, but I think you do adapt to the weather - physically, psychologically and practically - it's probably the same whatever climate you deal with.  If I travel to Europe now I generally find it freezing and too dry and I definitely find it easier to deal with Hong Kong summers than I would with US and UK winters.  That said if you come to visit avoid June - August and do drop me a line!

I'm currently having fun with my next project hammering studs into boucle, stay tuned.  Studs could very well replace doubleknit as my latest obsession.

Another Patrones 272/48 Stretch Pencil Skirt

I have reclaimed my sewing room after having my sister visit from the UK for Chinese New Year.  It was great to spend a decent amount of time with her and although I miss her now she is gone it is nice to be able to sew again.

The next few projects were all finished before she arrived, but I'm still working on the photography for some of them.  We had unseasonably gorgeous weather here in Hong Kong for Chinese New Year and I should have used that opportunity to take photographs, but I was tied up with other things and of course now it is dark and rainy.

This one is a pretty boring make, and is in fact a complete repeat of this skirt here, even down to the store where I bought the fabric.  One yard, HK$20 and about an hour of sewing and I have a new skirt.  Nothing new to add on the construction I just wanted to show that even projects that are so easy they seem like cheating are worth doing.

I know purple is not everyone's cup of tea but I am going through a bit of a purple phase right now, spurred on by my new not-balenciaga bag.  It will pass eventually!

Lastly to those who asked, the pattern for the navy doubleknit dress from my last post was from the monthly Burda Style magazine, the August 2009 issue.  You could try searching ebay and similar sites for it.  Burda make lots of their patterns available online here, but they don't seem to go back as far as this one unfortunately.